Mom seeks to grow family by raising funds with cross art

0513 Jenny Ballentine

For Jenny Ballentine, the road to creating a family has been paved with waiting and frustration, but also with joy and a bounty of art.

She spent 48 months undergoing fertility treatments before her son, Charlie, now 3, was born.

But when she and her husband, Brooks, went back to their fertility doctor a second time, the results were different. A year into the process, they learned they were 99 percent infertile.

“It was literally like this weight was lifted off my shoulders,” she said. “I knew God had other plans for us. No more drugs, no more shots, no more months and months of waiting without any answers.”

The couple began the adoption process that same month, in May 2011. Six months later, they began working with a California-based facilitator, and pieces of the adoption puzzle starting falling into place, only to fall right back apart.

“Over the next year, we were matched twice with a birth mother but neither worked out, due to circumstances with the mother,” she said.

Not long after the second failed match attempt, the Ballentines decided to engage in a self-driven effort to find a birth mother.

“So many of our friends wanted to help us raise funds” Ballentine said. “As an artist, I knew we could create something that would help us along this journey.”

Since 2005, Ballentine, a former second grade teacher at Vestavia East, has created custom home décor artwork, floor mats, front door decorations and more for her business It’s So You Art, which she runs with the help of her mom, Deborah Elliott, and older sister, Mande Elliott McLeod, also of Vestavia Hills.

Using remnants of other works she creates for It’s So You, the Ballentines conceptualized the “adoption cross” – a cross made of burlap layered against a chocolate brown backdrop. With design insight from Brooks, Jenny added old barn roofing from the couple’s storage to create an additional cross on top of the burlap.

Once the prototype was to their liking, Jenny and Brooks set to work, cranking out 123 of them over the course of one week.

“We thought, we’ll see what happens – let’s see if we sell any of these, if anyone even likes them,” she said. “The next week, we were making over 200 more. They sold so quickly.”

Several weeks into the venture, Ballentine said she realized this went well beyond fundraising.

“It wasn’t for the money. What I want most is to make that connection with a birth mother.”

Today, Ballentine’s adoption crosses can be found everywhere from The Polka Dot Pavilion in Geneva, Ala., to ShannAgain’s in Amory, Miss. Local fans who miss the art show circuit can find the art at Snoozy’s Kids in Crestline, and in Homewood’s popular state-focused mercantile, Alabama Goods.

And for that, she credits fellow Vestavia Hills resident and mother of three Amy Dill, whose two oldest children are adopted.

“We would never even have thought about spreading the word in this way if it wasn’t for Amy and her adoption story,” said Ballentine. “Both of her adoptions were by word of mouth; it gave us the hope that we could start spreading the word and finding a match that way.”

The adoption cross effort has generated leads, although to date the Ballentines have not yet found a match.

“Sometimes you have to step away to see,” she said. “I look at Amy’s family, and I see what I want mine to be.”

The couple is still working through its California-based facilitator.

“If we are matched there, and we also find a match through the crosses, I’ve told my husband that I guess our family will just grow faster!”